Talking to Metal Sludge magazine in 2000, Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante praised Slayer as "the Ramones of metal," referring to his contemporaries' status as the only first-wave thrash-metal act that never deviated from its core style. Nearly all of Slayer's peers — Metallica, Exodus, Voivod, Kreator, Celtic Frost, et al. — eventually downshifted from making capital-M Metal to more straight-ahead hard rock. It's tempting to attribute this collective migration to changing tastes and industry pressures sparked by the so-called "alternative revolution," but Metallica actually diluted their heaviness with their breakthrough 1991 "black album," a record that topped the charts and made the band superstars in the months before Nirvana's Nevermind dominated the pop/rock landscape.
That summer, Slayer co-headlined the stateside edition of the Clash of the Titans tour — a bill that also featured Anthrax and Megadeth. Today, nearly 25 years later, any of those bands would have trouble matching the unbridled vitality of their younger selves, but the bang-for-buck factor nevertheless rates nearly as high when Slayer comes to town on Monday, bringing with them fellow Bay Area thrash icons Testament and grindcore progenitors Carcass. All three bands are decades removed from their career-defining works: Testament's The New Order (1988), Carcass' Necroticism — Descanting the Insalubrious (1991) and of course Slayer's Reign in Blood (1986), which to this day towers over metal like a monolith of utterly engrossing violence and freneticism packed into 29 minutes. Everyone knows it's those aforementioned albums that bring metalheads young and old out to the shows. But, much more so than their tourmates, Slayer has achieved the status of pop culture icons.
The band that once sent chills down the spines of parents, promoters, concert security guards, record execs and even governments now gets its album titles name-checked on a TV show like Californication and appears at festivals like Bonnaroo. In 2014, Kendall Jenner rocked a Slayer shirt while hosting Canada's MuchMusic Video Awards. Latter-day Slayer guitarist Gary Holt, who is also the founder-bandleader of first-wave thrash forerunners Exodus, may have started sporting a "Kill the Kardashians" T-shirt onstage in response, but there's no denying that Slayer has been relegated to the safe, family-friendly brand of evil favored by cartoonish figures like Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper. At this point, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see Slayer end up as actual cartoons on The Simpsons.
And yet Benante was right: Slayer has never compromised its brutality. It perhaps says more about us and less about the band that their Nazi- and serial murder-fetishizing depictions of real-life horror barely raise eyebrows in 2016. For better and worse, Slayer has always maintained a bullheaded attitude, baiting controversy and outrage while flippantly dismissing their detractors as hysterical idiots who take them too literally. And to be fair, the band's most infamous song, Reign in Blood's horrifyingly graphic "Angel of Death," is no more an endorsement of Nazism or Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele than 2006's "Jihad" is an endorsement of Islamic extremism or 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.
Like most Slayer songs, both offer unflinching first-person accounts of monstrous acts. Late guitarist and longtime principal songwriter Jeff Hanneman, whom Holt replaced in 2011, initially on a short-term basis, wrote both songs. Hanneman had a distinct knack for dialing into the cold inhumanity of his protagonists and anchoring their perspective with riffs that make you want to get up and knock things around, especially your own body. As any Slayer fan can attest, the musical rush combined with the genuine creep factor make for an irresistible thrill that few (if any) other metal bands have captured so completely — even though hordes of them have gone further to try to be shocking.
When Clash of the Titans rolled into New York's Madison Square Garden in 1991, the pall that gripped the building as Slayer took the stage was both undeniable and — in the fullest sense of the word — marvelous. Megadeth and Anthrax certainly brought their share of aggression to the table, but Slayer made them sound like party music by comparison. At the time, though, I wasn't aware that the badass bird symbol on the back of my Slayer T-shirt bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to the Third Reich's iron eagle emblem. The two images look similar enough that people will, consciously or not, make the association, but they're just different enough that the band can dodge accusations.
Likewise, naming their fanclub Slatanic Wermacht and emulating Nazi SS typeface were intentional decisions that contribute to the ambiguity and power, but also to the genuinely ugly danger in the band's aura. It's worth noting that Jewish metal icons like Anthrax's Scott Ian, Sacred Reich's Phil Rind and Nuclear Assault/Brutal Truth's Dan Lilker are rabid, lifelong fans, as are anti-Nazi hardcore veterans Henry Rollins and Corrosion of Conformity's Reed Mullin. In the end, though, the band doesn't care what you think, a message they sent loud and clear by naming their new album Repentless.
Talking to the Scene by phone, Holt offers the following: "I never got to see Clash of the Titans because I was out on the road myself, but I've certainly noticed that something — an element of danger — comes over the place when Slayer takes the stage. Looking down at the crowd, though, it's all in fun. People are killing each other, but they're still smiling. And in the time that I've been playing with the band, I've never seen a Nazi skinhead presence in the crowd. That might have been something the band saw way before I was there, when they were playing small clubs. But everybody I know in thrash metal has had shows where we encountered that. It's disturbing. But Slayer's a pretty big band, and the audience is kind of mainstream now."
Email Music@nashvillescene.com
